Chapter 8. The Genetic Code

Up to this point we've used Perl to search for motifs, simulate DNA mutations, generate random sequences, and transcribe DNA to RNA. These are all important activities, and they serve as a good introduction to the computational techniques you can use to study biological systems.

In this chapter, we'll write Perl programs to simulate how the genetic code directs the translation of DNA into protein. I will start by introducing the hash datatype. Then, after a brief discussion of how different data structures (hashes, arrays, and databases) can store and access experimental information, we will write a program to translate DNA to protein. We'll also continue exploring regular expressions and write code to handle FASTA files.